Danger Dust

Highlights

• Long-term UFPs exposure significantly increased total non-accidental mortality.

• Mortalities for cardiovascular diseases were associated with UFP exposure.

• Hispanics and non-Hispanic Blacks experienced higher UFP-related mortalities.

• Young children, older adults, and non-NYC residents had higher UFP-Mortality risks.

• Exposure to UFPs during winter season further elevated the mortality risk.

Environmental Implication

Ultrafine particles (UFPs) are airborne particles less than 100 nm in aerodynamic diameter. The small size allows them to enter the body through lung easily and reach the most distal regions within hours. Compared to larger particles, the large surface area to volume ratio enables UFPs to absorb greater amounts of hazardous metal and organic compounds per unit. Our findings address the severest impact of UFPs on human mortality and the critical need for monitoring and regulating UFP levels in

Two weeks after setting a nationwide deadline for removal of lead pipes, the Biden administration is imposing strict new limits on dust from lead-based paint in older homes and childcare facilities.

A final rule announced on Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency sets limits on lead dust on floors and window sills in pre-1978 residences and childcare facilities to levels so low they cannot be detected.

Paint that contains lead was banned in 1978, but more than 30m American homes are believed to still contain it, including nearly 4m homes where children under the age of six live. Lead paint can chip off when it deteriorates or is disturbed, especially during home remodeling or renovation.

“There is no safe level of lead,” said Michal Freedhoff, EPA’s assistant administrator for chemical safety and pollution prevention. The new rule will bring the United States “closer to eradicating lead-based paint hazards from homes and childcare facilities once and for all”, she said.

The 2024 Cross-Canada Survey of Radon Exposure in the Residential Buildings of Urban and Rural Communities indicates that radioactive radon exposure in Canada is rising and continues to be a critical public health concern.

There are an estimated 10.3 million Canadians living in houses with high radon, increasing their risk of developing lung cancer in the future. The report reveals nearly 18% of Canadian homes contain radon levels at or above 200 Bq/m3, the threshold at which Health Canada advises action to reduce indoor radon levels. This is more than double the 7% of households that were estimated to have radon levels at or above this limit in 2012.

Canada has among one of the highest rates of lung cancer globally, despite one of the lowest rates of tobacco smoking,

Nobody knows who invented the wheel, or when it was first used. Most historians suspect it was invented in many places at different times around the world. What is known is that it was widely in use around the world as early as 3,000 BC.

In this new study, the researchers suggest the invention and use of the wheel may have originated in an Eastern European copper mine. Such a site, they note, makes sense because of the greatly improved efficiencies that would have resulted as heavy ore was extracted from a mine and carried down a mountainside.

A likely precursor might have been a roller, essentially a tree trunk with limbs removed. It is likely people discovered that things could be moved downhill more easily when they were tossed on rollers thousands of years before the wheel was invented, including ore products moved down mountainsides in Eastern European copper mines.

Scientists have revived activity in the brains of pigs up to nearly an hour after circulation had ceased. In some cases, functionality was sustained for hours through a surprising discovery by researchers in China.

This achievement represents a huge step forward in working out how to restore brain function after a patient has suffered a sudden cardiac arrest. It suggests that doctors may be able to widen the brief window for successful resuscitation of patients following cardiac arrest.

The trick? Incorporating the patient's unharmed liver – the organ the body uses to purify its blood – into the life support system used to revive the brain after the time had elapsed.

Source:

Liver protects neuron viability and electrocortical activity in post-cardiac arrest brain injury

https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.1038/s44321-024-00140-z

In August, doctors released a report detailing the first eight cases of silicosis in men cutting engineered – or artificial – stone, which is primarily quartz, a surface which has soared in popularity with homeowners having kitchen refurbishments in recent years.

The majority were migrants working in small workshops who weren’t provided with adequate safety measures, echoing a trend seen in other countries, with an average age of 34 and the youngest aged 27.

One person has died with the disease and two were referred for lung transplant assessment.

When moving forward in the rain, vertical surfaces such as a person’s body will be hit by more raindrops as speed increases. From the walker’s perspective, the drops appear to fall at an angle, with a horizontal velocity equal to their own walking speed.

While walking faster means encountering more drops per second, it also reduces the time spent in the rain. As a result, the two effects balance each other out: more drops per unit of time, but less time in the rain overall.

When the walker is stationary, rain only falls on horizontal surfaces – the top of the head and shoulders. As the walker begins to move, she or he receives raindrops that would have fallen in front, while missing the drops that now fall behind. This creates a balance, and ultimately, the amount of rain received on horizontal surfaces remains unchanged, regardless of the walking speed.

However, since walking faster reduces the total time spent in the rain, the overall amount of water collected on horizontal surfaces will be less.

Air pollution is often viewed as an outdoor hazard and a threat to respiratory health. Emerging research shows that air pollution may also affect our brain health. Fine particulate matter (PM2.5), is a complex mixture of many chemicals that can be inhaled deep into the lungs. While PM2.5 exposure has long been linked to tissue damage and inflammation in the lung, its role in cognitive decline is only now gaining attention.

The study is published in the journal Science Advances.

"An aging thymus leads to a 'leaky' immune system," said lead author John White, a Professor in and Chair of McGill's Department of Physiology. "This means the thymus becomes less effective at filtering out immune cells that could mistakenly attack healthy tissues, increasing the risk of autoimmune diseases like type 1 diabetes."

He noted that researchers have known for years that vitamin D helps the body absorb calcium for strong bones, and that more recent research has discovered its crucial role in regulating the immune system.

"Our findings bring new clarity to this connection and could lead to new strategies for preventing autoimmune diseases," he said.

Imagine a thin wristband that monitors your steps and heartbeat like an Apple Watch. Or clothing that keeps you cool with built-in air conditioning. Or even a flexible implant that could help your heart better than a bulky pacemaker. That’s the promise of a new, electrically active material researchers have created by combining short chains of amino acids called peptides with snippets of a polymer plastic. This “electric plastic,” reported this month in Nature, can store energy or record information, opening the door to self-powered wearables, real-time neural interfaces, and medical implants that merge with bodies better than current tech.

Today the perilous state of the environment is often in the news. Many stories describe how Earth is being damaged by human beings and discuss ways to prevent this.

These concerns are not new. Millennia ago, people in ancient Greece and Rome already knew humans were damaging the natural world. Literature from these ancient times contains many references to the environment and the harms it suffers.

Many of these insights ring true today. Polluting the soil we farm, air we breathe and water we drink has clear repercussions. We can only degrade the environment for so long before it will come back to haunt us.

Research at the Francis Crick Institute could lead to new drugs to counter progress of diseases like Alzheimer’s

British scientists are about to launch a remarkable research project that will demonstrate how the air we breathe can affect our brains. This work will be vital, they say, in understanding a major medical problem: how atmospheric pollution can trigger dementia.

In recent years, scientists have discovered that air pollution is one of the most pernicious threats to human health and have shown it is involved in causing cancer, heart disease, diabetes, low birthrates, and many health conditions.

From dumping iron into the ocean to launching mirrors into space, proposals to cool the planet through “geoengineering” tend to be controversial—and sometimes fantastical. A new idea isn’t any less far-out, but it may avoid some of the usual pitfalls of strategies to fill the atmosphere with tiny, reflective particles.

In a modeling study published this month in Geophysical Research Letters, scientists report that shooting 5 million tons of diamond dust into the stratosphere each year could cool the planet by 1.6ºC—enough to stave off the worst consequences of global warming. The scheme wouldn’t be cheap, however: experts estimate it would cost nearly $200 trillion over the remainder of this century—far more than traditional proposals to use sulfur particles.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are widely used in consumer and industrial products but have subsequently raised concerns about their toxicity. To evaluate factors influencing PFAS concentrations in drinking water and to estimate human exposure, ten PFAS were measured in tap water from the UK and China, also bottled water originating from 15 different countries.

In this study, perfluorooctanoic acid and perfluorooctanesulfonate (PFOS) were the most frequently detected (>99%) and dominated in global bottled water, with other PFAS also highly detected (67%–93%). ∑10PFAS concentrations differed significantly in natural mineral vs purified, but not in glass vs plastic and still vs sparkling bottled water.

High detection rates of target PFAS in both tap and bottled water highlight necessary for monitoring a wide range of PFAS. Estimated human exposure of target PFAS via drinking water does not appear serious human health risk. Interestingly, boiling and activated carbon filtration can reduce substantially (50%–90%) concentrations of PFAS in water.

Imagine you wake up in a hospital without a single memory of the last month. Doctors say you had a series of violent episodes and paranoid delusions. You'd become convinced you were suffering from bipolar disorder. Then, after a special test, a neurologist diagnoses you with a rare autoimmune disease called anti-NMDAR (Anti-N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor) encephalitis. This is what happened to Susannah Cahalan, a New York Post reporter who would go on to write the best-selling memoir Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness.

Anti-NMDAR encephalitis can lead to hallucinations, blackouts, and psychosis, says Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Professor Hiro Furukawa. It mostly affects women ages 25 to 35—the same age at which schizophrenia often presents itself. But what's happening in anti-NMDAR encephalitis is something else.

Post-mortem studies have shown that patients dying from severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) infection frequently have pathological changes in their CNS, particularly in the brainstem.

Many of these changes are proposed to result from para-infectious and/or post-infection immune responses. Clinical symptoms such as fatigue, breathlessness, and chest pain are frequently reported in post-hospitalized coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients.

We propose that these symptoms are in part due to damage to key neuromodulatory brainstem nuclei.

While brainstem involvement has been demonstrated in the acute phase of the illness, the evidence of long-term brainstem change on MRI is inconclusive.

We therefore used ultra-high field (7 T) quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) to test the hypothesis that brainstem abnormalities persist in post-COVID patients and that these are associated with persistence of key symptoms.

Neither vaccinations nor immunity from infections seem to thwart SARS-CoV-2 for long. The frequency of new infections within a few months of a previous bout or a shot is one of COVID-19’s most vexing puzzles. Now, scientists have learned that a little-known type of immune cell in the bone marrow may play a major role in this failure.

The study, which appeared last month in Nature Medicine, found that people who received repeated doses of vaccine, and in some cases also became infected with SARS-CoV-2, largely failed to make special antibody-producing cells called long-lived plasma cells (LLPCs).

Recently, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency adopted a more stringent annual-average air quality standard for PM2.5 (9 μg/m3). Here, we demonstrate that 44% of urban areas exceeding this new standard─encompassing ∼20 million people─would remain undetected because of gaps in the current PM2.5 monitoring network.

Crucially, we find that “uncaptured” hotspots, which contain 2.8 million people in census tracts that are misclassified as in attainment of the new PM2.5 standard, have substantially higher percentages of minority populations (i.e., people of color, disadvantaged communities, and low-income populations) compared with the overall U.S. population.

To address these gaps, we highlight 10 priority locations that could reduce the population in the uncaptured hotspots by 67%.

Overall, our findings highlight the urgent need to address gaps in the existing monitoring network.

Our results also provide a physically based and experimentally verifiable explanation for landslide creep. In short, the inherently rate strengthening behavior of clay-rich shear zones may explain the behavior of slow landslides developed in Franciscan mélange.

This, in turn, suggests that it may be possible to predict which landslides are prone to catastrophic acceleration on the basis of paired geologic mapping and laboratory measurements of frictional properties. For example, creeping landslides revealed by synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR) in the western United States are commonly associated with surface exposures of clay-rich subduction mélange.

Where these rocks transition to quartz-rich turbiditic sandstones to the north, evidence for creeping landslides largely disappears, although evidence for landsliding is still ubiquitous in the topography.

This potential lithologic control on the style of landslide failure is notable and raises the possibility that fundamental differences in landslide behavior—and hazard—in these two settings, and elsewhere, could be controlled by opposing frictional properties (i.e., rate strengthening versus rate weakening) in the contrasting lithologies in the two settings, a hypothesis that is eminently testable through targeted experiments of rock friction.

Researchers have used artificial intelligence (AI) to uncover 70,500 viruses previously unknown to science on many of them weird and nothing like known species. The RNA viruses were identified using metagenomics, in which scientists sample all the genomes present in the environment without having to culture individual viruses. The method shows the potential of AI to explore the ‘dark matter’ of the RNA virus universe.

Forget the gauze and bandages: electrical stimulation near the ear might help to reduce bleeding. Researchers hope the technique could one day be used before surgery, childbirth and other events that pose a risk of dangerously uncontrolled bleeding.

The treatment, called a ‘neural tourniquet’ by its creators, helps to turbocharge the activity of platelets, which are cell fragments that form blood clots, according to preliminary results presented at the 2024 Society for Neuroscience conference.

Silica-Related Diseases

Silica dust exposure may contribute to several serious, debilitating and life-altering health conditions. Lung cancer and silicosis are among the more severe conditions caused by silica dust.

Health Conditions Related to Silica Dust

Autoimmune disorders

Bronchitis

Cardiovascular impairment

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Emphysema

Kidney disease

Lung cancer

Silicosis

Pulmonary silicosis is a debilitating condition that causes the formation of silicotic nodules in the lungs. These lesions tend to group in the upper lobes. They can lead to impaired lung function and eventually death. Silica dust exposure is the only cause of silicosis.

A paper published by The Lancet Infectious Diseases today offers some answers. It shows the currently circulating strain of the Oropouche virus replicates far better in cell cultures than an older strain did—suggesting it may do better in humans as well. The data also suggest the current strain is different enough from earlier ones that people infected a decade ago have almost no immunity against today’s version. “This is not a new virus,” but it seems to “replicate faster, replicate better, and be more virulent.

Recently, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency adopted a more stringent annual-average air quality standard for PM2.5 (9 μg/m3). Here, we demonstrate that 44% of urban areas exceeding this new standard─encompassing ∼20 million people─would remain undetected because of gaps in the current PM2.5 monitoring network.

Crucially, we find that “uncaptured” hotspots, which contain 2.8 million people in census tracts that are misclassified as in attainment of the new PM2.5 standard, have substantially higher percentages of minority populations (i.e., people of color, disadvantaged communities, and low-income populations) compared with the overall U.S. population.

To address these gaps, we highlight 10 priority locations that could reduce the population in the uncaptured hotspots by 67%.

Overall, our findings highlight the urgent need to address gaps in the existing monitoring network.

While peanut allergens can be detected at very low levels in the air when shelling nuts, the dust settles quickly and can only be detected in very close proximity to the nuts, implying that very little dust circulates in the air.

What's more, aircraft cabin ventilation systems are designed to circulate air across the aircraft, rather than along the cabin, so minimizing the potential for spreading passenger-generated contaminants through the cabin, explain the authors.

Air is completely exchanged every three to four minutes during a flight. This compares with every 10 minutes for hospitals and classrooms. In modern large commercial aircraft, around half of the air intake is recirculated air that has passed through particulate air filters which effectively remove dust, vapors, microbes, and capture aerosolized food particles at the same time. The other half comes from outside.